Author Paul O’Connor joins us today for an interview about his newly launched digital comic book story 4 Seconds. You can read 4 Seconds for free at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent. Paul discusses with us the technical side of producing a story for Thrillbent’s unique reading platform, including how he invented a new scripting technique working with artist Billy King on the initial concept design and artist Karl Kesel on the final story.

Paul, what is 4 Seconds and how did it come about?

4 Seconds is an original comic story in digital form published at Mark Waid’s Thrillbent site. It is free to read right now, and I hope everyone will give it a shot. The story is self-contained and easy to complete in one sitting. It tells the tale of a petty thief who discovers she can see into the future… but only 4 seconds into the future! This proves to be just enough superpower to get her into trouble.

The story was born when I won Mark Waid’s open-microphone pitch contest at San Diego Comic-Con. I was super-excited for this job, because I am a big believer in the new way stories can be told at Thrillbent. There are dozens of stories at the site, many of them are free, and they all have something to say about how comic stories can be told beyond the printed page.

As someone who makes books, I’d love to hear about the technical side of creating 4 Seconds specifically for the Thrillbent digital format. What’s unique about Thrillbent compared to printed comics, or even other digital platforms?

Even during the pitch stage, it was important to me that I create a story best told (or perhaps only told) in the Thrillbent format. Thrillbent specializes in digital-native stories that expand the way comics stories are told. It is critical to understand that these are still comics stories. They aren’t motion comics, and they don’t have soundtracks or spoken dialogue. They are still words, pictures, and panels that the reader pages through at their own pace.

One way things are different is in the fluidity of transitions afforded by this platform. For instance, we can do actual fades, wipes, and pans, imparting a more cinematic feel to a traditional comics story. Likewise, this platform allows for new types of page architecture and panel borders, and new approaches to balloon placement and dialogue construction. In creating 4 Seconds, artist Karl Kesel and I tried to take full advantage of being in a paperless environment, and using this platform to tell our story in a more memorable way. 4 Seconds is built from the ground-up to be a new thing in familiar clothing.

Tell me how those possibilities came to life in creating a scene from 4 Seconds.

For example, we might have a “master shot”—say, a nighttime interior of the mansion of the villainous Anton Glass. Rather than show the entire shot at once, our story might reveal it in portions—first showing just that slice illuminated by the moody moonlight leaking through the floor-to-ceiling windows, then picking up the trail of bloody footprints on the floor, then finding the outstretched hand of a body lying just inside the shadows.

Across this, we place our characters, posing them for the critical moments of storytelling. And then we bring in dialogue balloons, captions, and sound effects. What Karl had to deliver were all the many individual panels, frames, and character poses that made up the story, which are then placed in the correct order for viewing via Thrillbent.

The results are equivalent to what might be many panels and pages in a paper comic, all playing out in the same narrative space using comic conventions of panels to parse time and focus reader attention on the sequential elements needed to tell the story. It’s still the same toolbox used in conventional comics, but there’s greater freedom of expression in how it’s used, particularly when it comes to isolating specific elements that you want the reader to see.

How was writing the 4 Seconds script different from comic scripts you’ve written for other media? Was it anything like a traditional comic book script?

This was a very different process. The Thrillbent format demanded that I take a new approach to scripting, and I also challenged myself to think in visual terms from the get-go. I deliberately went outside of my comfort zone of concentrating on dialogue and description and leaving everything else up to the artist. Instead, I wanted to provide a deeply thought-out visual blueprint for Karl, which he could (and did!) use as a springboard to make things even better in the penciling stage.

That meant I was doing scene-blocking and transitions—new things for me—and also figuring out how to break the rules as fast as I made them! To tie it all together, I invented a hybrid script form that offers conventional comics direction, dialogue, etc., but abandoned panels as the unit of storytelling in favor of frame advances. Determining how much information to add/change to each advance drives the pace of the story, and sometimes the challenge is as much about deciding what to retain from previous frames more than it is about what to add.

Thank you, Paul! 4 Seconds keeps the twists and turns coming right up to the very end. Revealing the story in frames like this means readers share Cassie’s experience of her world. They know something is coming in that empty space of the future, but they can’t see far enough ahead to be sure what it is. I found it drew me into the story and made me care that much more about what happened to her.

Privacy in Peril: The Private Eye and Recent Developments in Privacy, DRM, and Copyright

One of my classes this semester deals with telecommunications policy in the USA. Now, even though I am late to the party on The Private Eye, I spent an evening devouring all ten issues of the digital comic book series this week. I was pleasantly surprised to discover it deals with many of the concerns we have discussed in the telecom class. Our first discussion centered around two articles on mobile apps that either lack adequate security or mine your device for your personal data and contacts.

The Private Eye series addresses relevant privacy and intellectual property concerns not just in its content but in its form. It comes to us from author Brian K. Vaughan (who wrote such critically acclaimed series as Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, and wrote for the TV show Lost for a time) with art from Marcos Martin and Muntsa Vicente. It is available at http://panelsyndicate.com/ as ten individual issues and now in two 150-page volumes which collect the complete story.

First, the content of this science-fiction/mystery adventure deals with privacy and the internet. It proposes a future where all the information people stored about themselves in “the cloud” was exposed through an event called “the flood”. Dialogue reveals that making people’s search histories public destroyed their lives. As a result, the internet exists no more, and people are quite paranoid about protecting their privacy. Just as people do today in online forums and multi-player video games, people in this future use physical costumes and fake names to mask their identity and explore their fantasies, sexual kinks, and other aspects of identity they want kept private. Photographing people without their consent has become a crime, a crime the story’s hero commits for cash as a private investigator. The story’s villain wants to [spoiler alert] bring back the internet.

But besides the privacy conflict at the story’s center, the distribution of this series also ties in with concerns about copyright, digital rights management, and the ease of sharing content through the internet. The series is only available digitally, and it is sold on a “pay what you can” basis. Readers choose their own price, even if that price is zero dollars. This addresses the sales problem of digital content: How do you get people to pay a specific price for digital content when it is so easily downloaded and shared among users? Here, there is no problem. If people cannot or do not want to pay, they can still get the series directly from the creators without skirting the law, and those who can afford to support the work can choose to do so.

The download files, made available upon payment, are given free of Digital Rights Management, a system of protecting copyrighted and trademarked works which has proven problematic for users and courts. Recent headlines have shown how silly DRM takedown requests can get, with Forbes reporting in August that “Columbia Pictures, the studio behind the critically-panned movie Pixels, has succeeded in getting a number of utterly unrelated videos pulled from Vimeo – but the only actual footage from the movie to be taken down is Columbia’s own official trailer.” DRM takedown requests have become the occupation of lawyers who can file them without any actual investigation, leading to such ridiculous outcomes as random videos that mention the word “pixels” in ways unrelated to the film having been forced offline. Headlines in August also revealed UK legislation which is so technologically mis-informed that it would criminalize making a back-up copy of your own mp3 music files library. The creators of The Private Eye have sidestepped this nonsense and simply made their files available without DRM restrictions on the files.

The Private Eye, besides being an excellent and entertaining read, highlights the growing divide between how large, institutionally entrenched corporations are dealing with these concerns compared to the way independent creators are looking for new and more flexible solutions. This is taking place alongside a surge in advance sales (such as Michael Gira’s band Swans releasing limited-edition, handmade concert recordings to fund the production of upcoming studio albums) and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter which help secure funding before a project is finished rather than trying to control “piracy” after the fact. These solutions favor creators who understand the unique technological environment of our time and want to maintain creative control without resorting to the cumbersome and ill-advised measures favored by the industry giants, their lawyers, and our legislatures.

To close on a visual note, I especially appreciate that The Private Eye is the first digital comic I have seen which looked awesome on my monitor due to the horizontally wider aspect ratio. Comics made at the right aspect ratio for print just never look as great on my screen. I have to zoom in to read the text, and thus can’t see the whole page at once, which is part of the joy of comics. The Private Eye fixes this beautifully and lends itself to creative page layouts that take full advantage of its aspect ratio. Go pick up the two collected volumes and pay what you can!

No DRM, no encryption, just plain files optimised for on-screen reading. Available in English, Spanish, Catalan, Portuguese & French.

This 100+ page epic by Czech artist Nikkarin follows a pilgrim named Bo as he travels through a post-apocalyptic and thoroughly psychedelic wasteland, getting acquainted with the new realities of a post-war world.

130 Odyssey may be the first comic we’ve read from a Czech artist. Its infrequent dialogue takes place in English, at least in the version we previewed. Our images here are from some untranslated sources online, but we read it in English. Its original title reads as 130 Odysea. Regardless, this work relies mostly on purely pictorial storytelling. Nikkarin shows little interest in explaining through exposition the strange places and people on this journey. Instead, the reader becomes immersed in the unfamiliar, a wandering soul in the landscape of the artist’s imagination.

We won’t say we completely understood 130 Odyssey on the first read. On the other hand, incomprehensiblity may be part of its charm. Everything has changed, and we discover it with Bo as the journey unfolds. We would recommend this work to our readers in the States who have already discovered Moebius and other European talents, or to readers who want to get a taste of something off the beaten path of American comics.

Jack Kirby’s art has always been described as being so action-packed that it seems the characters are jump right off the page. When I found out that Jack had done two 3D Comics books, I thought I’d like to see that for myself.

I recently began reading some comics digitally and creating my own digital comics (where you scan pages onto your computer, and then put them in a zip file.) I downloaded a free Comic Reader App. I think there are a few out there, but the one I like and use is called GrassGames’ Comic Reader, for the iPad. It’s pretty bare bones, with a zoom feature which can lock, for easier reading when flipping pages, and a crystal clear display – somewhat better than Comixology.

GrassGames’ Comic Reader gives you three issues as an example of what it’s like. Just tap on the side (don’t slide, only tap,) and you’ll flip through the pages. Touch the bottom of the screen to display the menu, where you and navigate to different pages, see settings, and go back to your list of issues by pressing the “+” icon. It’s pretty easy once you know how to use it but can feel cumbersome at first.

To download new files onto it, all you have to do is connect your iPad to the computer and, through iTunes, go to “Sharing Files.” There you can place files onto the GrassGames Comic Reader app. If you make your own issues by scanning an issue you have into the computer, remember to number the files in order. Cover is 1, pages are 2, 3, etc. If you don’t, it can get all mixed up.

The place they suggest for downloading free comics is the Digital Comic Museum. You have to sign up for free to download anything. But, once you do, you have access to a wide array of unique comics. They stress that they carefully check to make sure all issues offered are in the public domain. So, there isn’t much in the way of Superman or Batman. Captain Marvel and Plastic Man, strangely enough, are there – while other characters you’d think might be public domain (like Jack Kirby’s Fighting American) aren’t available.

I specifically wanted to look for Jack Kirby issues. While they don’t have some of his more famous books, they have a lot of his older work like Black Cat Mystery, Alarming Tales, Justice Traps the Guilty, The Strange World of Your Dreams, and other books. You have to look around for what you like and see whether it’s good quality or not. Sometimes the scans aren’t very good to begin with as some people are scanning from their very own copies.

Anyway – I was surprised to see Jack Kirby’s Captain 3D! I only know of two 3D books he did: Captain 3D, and later The Battle for a Three Dimensional World, the latter not being available in the public domain.

Still, here was my chance to try out Jack Kirby’s artwork in 3D! I was happy to discover that it works perfectly well on the iPad. All you need are old versions of 3D glasses with red and bluish green lenses. The issue is presented in black and white. So, if you’re able to see the artwork clearly (without many double lines,) then the art should generally look white as well. It’s not perfect – there are a few inherent inconsistencies – but for the most part, it really works! I actually don’t see this much depth even in movie theaters.

Just like Kirby draws his art, there are layers of background, characters, and foreground objects. Given his already dynamic art style, it works extremely well here. One panel, where Captain 3D is punching out a gang of thugs, looks great. All the enemies are kind of floating right there on the panel, mid punch! Another page shows a downward view on a high-rise skyscraper under construction. It really looks incredible!

The story, also, isn’t half bad. It essentially tells the story of a young boy named Danny, who runs a book store his parents left to him. A man hurriedly brings in a book and gives it to Danny. Before he knows it, an unknown assailant fires a ray gun that melts the man into nothingness. Danny tries tell a police officer but isn’t believed. Later, he looks at the book, and there’s a strangely dressed man and some 3D Glasses. Wearing the glasses, Danny looks at the book, with the man on the page leaping out of it and into Danny’s world. The book is called “The Book of D.” Captain 3D explains that he is a survivor of a long-dead society with highly advanced technology that allowed them to suspend the Captain inside The Book of D.

The Book of D gets passed from generation to generation to keep it safe from mankind’s deadly enemy, the Cat People. These Cat People appear like normal citizens but, through the gaze of the lenses, Danny can see them for what they really are. Apparently the Cat People originally destroyed the long-dead society and have through the ages tried to recover The Book of D for themselves.

Danny goes on an adventure with Captain 3D in the next story (split up into 3 parts) facing a leader of the Cat People, a woman named Tigra. She wants to be able to create an army using the same technique used to create the book of D. Captain 3D and Danny stop her, of course, with her manufactured soldiers burning up and dissolving into the paper they once were. The third story has a more conventional super-hero adventure: Danny and Captain 3D try to stop a gangster with a distinctive metal plate in his head. It’s less exciting, detached from the previous narratives, but has some cool 3D shots.

I believe only one issue was published. The idea of “Cat People” was a little strange. But, overall, the character and the story are very engaging, especially so for young children who originally read it. Partnering Captain 3D with Danny gave the story a somewhat Captain Marvel-like quality, where this young boy can call upon powers beyond himself.

There’s something funny to read in the opening pages, where they explain 3D Comics to kids. 3D Comics obviously didn’t set the world on fire – but with fine-print safety directions like this, they sure gave it their all!

In the gallery below, you’ll find a few images from the series. Some are 3D, and others are examples of the art Kirby created to make these books. You can see the difference in styles in Kirby’s artwork as some of the images come from “The Battle for a Three Dimensional World.”